


flicker beat

by jehoney



Category: Archie Comics & Related Fandoms, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: (i mean it's not bc arch is a big bi but hey), Fire Magic, Friendship, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Late Night Conversations, Magic, Other, POV Second Person, Supernatural Elements, Unrequited Love, appreciate the platonicism, hot dog and salem Don't Get On, jug and sabrina do, jug needs a hug, pyromaniac jughead, that sounds better than "reader insert"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-31
Updated: 2017-03-31
Packaged: 2018-10-13 08:42:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10510275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jehoney/pseuds/jehoney
Summary: He watches, intently, pale eyes mirroring the flickering until you can imagine his pupils as two miniature stars, and there’s a kind of hunger in the way his breath ghosts over his parted lips, the bottom one split with the newest of bruises. He’s fervent, like he would swallow the fire right out of your hand if you let him and, slowly, thin fingers come up to linger in the radius of heat surrounding it. After a drawn out minute, he recovers the power of speech.“How… How do you do that?”And you turn your palm to face downwards, the sphere gliding across skin like a crystal ball to rest on the back of your hand.And you tell him.“Magic.”white haired girl and black haired boy. night-time suits them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i know we haven't met sabrina in riverdale yet but i just finished jughead vol. 2 and let me tell you these guys are the best of friends
> 
> i'm lowkey super proud of this pls hmu in the comments i love u all
> 
> (cw for kids playing with fire and slight pyromania!)
> 
> enjoy x

The first time, you’re seven.

It’s a mystic number, you know that much. You’ve been taking your lessons for nearly three years now, and feel like you know everything there is to know, including the portentious significance of the number: seven days in a week, seven colours in the rainbow. Seven deadly sins and seven heavenly virtues.

It’s indivisible, too. Like him, you think.

The first time, you see the dog before you see him.

Well, you say _see._ You hear Salem hiss, back arched and bristling in the pale moonlight, and drag your attention from the droplets of water you’ve been attempting to move around on the roof tile in front of you. Aunt Zelda’s been telling you that you lack finesse, so you’re trying things on a smaller scale.

_(“It’s all very well to make the vase fly into the wall, Sabrina, now try and put the pieces back together again!”)_

But you can either move them all, or nothing, so the bounding white shape across the grass below is a welcome distraction. From your avian vantage point, and the mass of white, shaggy fur, it’s impossible to tell just what it is, and the figure chasing after it is so quick and silent, dressed in the shades of the night you both inhabit, that only the ripple of the grass gives him away, the post-impact of pebble on pond.

You don’t have other kids round to play. Rules of the house, Aunt Hilda says, too much possibility that one will find the spell books, or the mortar and pestle tucked in the back of the corner cupboard, so even from two stories away the sight of someone new amongst the everyday familiarity of the treeline makes your stomach leap.

You could call down, but you know someone would hear, so you settle for shuffling, slowly, precariously, until your legs are dangling over the edge of the gutter and suddenly he’s looking up, face starkly pale against all that darkness.

“Sorry about my dog.”

He speaks in a kind of whisper shout, the mop with legs gathered up in his arms and he does, genuinely, look sorry, ink stain eyebrows drawn downward, one bruised shadow under his left eye angrier and darker than the other. You and Salem are silent.

“How’d you get your hair so white?” he asks, as the bundle squirms in his grip, and you laugh, so small you’re not even sure if he catches it. As you shrug, tilting your head, the hair in question swings, brilliant in the light of the moon.

_(“You’re a lunar child, Sabrina. Don’t forget that.”)_

“How’d you get your dog so white?”

And it’s his turn to smile now, stained lips curling at the edges as the words tumble from the rooftop down to him. The uptilt of his jaw to meet your eyes exposes his neck, and even from the ledge you can count the moles, like flecks of shadow, one, two-- seven, in all.

Indivisible.

You think about tracking them around on his skin, like droplets on a slate roof tile.

And after a hovering moment, he’s disappearing back into the blackness of the trees, as phantom-like as the way he came. He’s heading towards Riverdale, you realise, down to the bankside, and only now do you wonder why he’s wandering so far, so late.

You wonder if you’ll see him again.

 

* * *

 

 

Every time he returns, it’s night time.

You begin to wonder if he only survives outside of daylight hours, if he’s a night walker like in the books Zelda and Hilda think you’re too young to read but you sneak off the shelf anyway. The signs all point to it: the pallor of his skin, the ease with which the blood rises to the surface and mottles in a purple medley, the odd, jagged edges of his cap and the archaism of his name. You check when you know he can’t see you, under the line of his jaw, for puncture marks, deeper and redder than the moles; you can’t find them. There’s still only seven.

You think that if vampires exist, you’d like him to be one.

Every time he returns, he brings his lolloping dog, who you find out is named ‘Hot Dog’ (Salem sniggers, and you tell him not to be rude.) oddly silent in his movements for all his energy and mass.

After the first time, you don’t think it’s fair to stay perched on the rooftop whist he cranes his neck to whisper-shout, so the two of you sit instead, cross legged, hidden from view amongst the tall grass. You, the white-haired girl with the pitch-black cat; him, with his ink blot curls and dog the colour of midday clouds. (Not that you ever share middays.)

He’s the first person you tell.

Well, you say _tell._

As summer draws to a close the nights chill down, until your pyjamas and thick woollen sweater can’t keep out the cold, and although, even in the dead of night, he’s dressed in jeans and sneakers, he never seems to be warm enough. (More evidence for the vampire theory, you think.)

So, almost without thinking, you conjure a flame in the palm of your hand

_(“We won’t move to Pyrodynamics until you’re older, Sabrina. Until you’re old enough.”)_

You’ve been practising for a while now, because what better way to attain ‘finesse’ than with the most dangerous substance in existence, and besides, you figure, you’re eight next month anyway, which is practically an adult.

The fire hovers above your palm, warmth condensed and radiating, and you’ve done this over and over, sometimes with just sputtering sparks, sometimes with flaring that singes Salem’s tail, so there’s nothing out of the ordinary about a floating fireball in front of you. As you look up from it, though, it’s evidently out of the ordinary for him.

He watches, intently, pale eyes mirroring the flickering until you can imagine his pupils as two miniature stars, and there’s a kind of hunger in the way his breath ghosts over his parted lips, the bottom one split with the newest of bruises. He’s fervent, like he would swallow the fire right out of your hand if you let him and, slowly, thin fingers come up to linger in the radius of heat surrounding it. After a drawn out minute, he recovers the power of speech.

“How… How do you do that?”

And you turn your palm to face downwards, the sphere gliding across skin like a crystal ball to rest on the back of your hand. And you tell him.

“Magic.”

 

* * *

 

_SEVEN YEARS LATER_

“I can try and fix that for you, you know.”

This time, it’s a swollen, stained black eye, that leaks broken blood vessels down his cheeks and bruises across the bridge of his nose. You’ve seen it before, or something like it, except the stories are different lately – heavy hands don’t just come from his father nowadays, but the kids at school, too.

“They’d notice. It’s fine.”

Healing has been your lesson focus for the last month, since you twisted your ankle falling off your broom, and you’re getting quite good, you think, closing up scratches, watching bruises fade from blue to yellow on the surface of your skin; although the side of his face is a real mess, you could do _something_ with it. If he wanted you to, that is.

But instead, he just sits, and after so long the grass has stopped growing in the two-metre radius where you’ve been sitting, once a week on average, for seven years. In the centre there’s a neat, scorched circle, from where the fire hovers, and it’s either a goddamn miracle or a conveniently place distraction charm that Zelda and Hilda haven’t found it, but they never venture outside of the neatly tended herb garden, even if you do own the whole acre on which the house sits, crooked and creaking. Hot Dog is subdued tonight, flopping down and resting his head on Jughead’s thigh, but Salem still greets him like they’re hostile strangers, with appropriate apprehension.

 “First week of high school,” he says, like he owes you an explanation, but you’ve been through this enough times that he knows, by now, that he doesn’t owe you anything. Besides, it doesn’t actually go very far as to explaining why he’s been socked in the eye, but you figure that any kid who spends his nights visiting the witch girl over the river in Greendale can’t be all that popular.

He tells you about the week, about how he and Archie have practically every class together, and how Betty beat Dilton in the biology quiz, and you’ve heard the names for so long that it feels like you’ve been to school with them for years too. You know about how Betty loves fix cars more than anything, that Archie’s favourite food is pancakes and he can make them better than any kid on the block. You know that Reggie used to be cool, and he and Jughead would walk their dogs together but now that they’re in high school he’s got himself a leather jacket and is trying to elbow himself onto the football team. You know about the junior boys, ‘Socs’ as he calls them in a reference to some outdated book that he likes so much, who’ve taken it upon themselves to make his life hell because his father is a ‘Serpent’. You know about the Serpents.

(There aren’t any serpents in Greendale, save for the dried ones in the pantry.)

As he talks, slightly lopsidedly to avoid the strain on bruised muscles, you conjure three flames and set them in a row in front of you both, Hot Dog’s black eyes reflecting back the light like liquid. With the years, and guidance, the spheres burn warm into the centre, safe to touch and no longer in danger of singeing the tails of certain cats, and you know he takes advantage of this in the way he passes his fingers through them, letting the fire lick at his skin. You feel like Prometheus, smuggling fire down for man to marvel at.

You can’t tell if the glint in his eyes is because of this, though, because it appears any time he talks about his friends over in Riverdale. When he’s describing the way Betty’s eyes follow the trace of her pen there’s this soft glow behind his irises, (and you hope to Hecate he goes home and writes down what he’s saying to you now, because he could make some writer one day)  but lately, when Archie’s name passes his lips there’s something stronger, like that first hunger you saw when you set fire to your palm all those years ago. And the fervency’s there in the breath over his lips, in the way he mouths around the harsh central sound in his name, how he doesn’t think you notice his fingertips flickering at the edges of your hovering night lights when he talks about Archie’s treehouse, and Archie’s dog, and Archie’s flaming, burning hair.

You don’t know if you should be worried. Not about the way he talks about Archie, because you’ve got no place to know anything about these distant, half reported friendships across Sweetwater, but this fixation he has with the fire.

 

 

_One time, nearly five years ago, now, he doesn’t show up for months. Eventually, you don’t bother staying up at your window to watch for him, it’s only Salem who alerts you to his return, and he trudges across the grass with a kind of world worn weariness, before telling you he’s been in the juvenile detention centre, and you begin to underestimate how fragile you thought he was. When you ask him why, he darts a tongue out over his cracked bottom lip and can’t seem to tear his gaze away from the burning, but he manages an answer, softly._

_“I wanted to make fire.”_

_You think that maybe he was Prometheus after all._

_Because he’s the one who got his fingers singed, permanent school record emblazoned with attempted arson and a newfound simmering borne out of those months in juvy that seems to prickle away under his skin, even now._

_So you say:_

_“Let’s leave that to me, yeah?”_

_And he smiles, inked lips curling up at the corners like the burnt edges of a scrap of paper._

 

 

Now, at fourteen, he’s got that urgency again, like reaching for the centre of the flame can reach into Archie, and the simmering in him is growing, like it does when he’s got something he needs to say.

“What is it?” you ask, but he shakes his head and pulls his hand out of the light, so you ask a different question, but one that you still need to be answered.

“Why do you like it so much?”

And, uniquely, he manages to look through the flickering distractions and meet your eye.

“It’s like… a thing, but you can’t hold it. Like—Like a substance, but it’s not, because it’s a process, it’s not some _thing_ at all. You can’t define it.”

You can’t pull it apart to find its components, or you get burnt. It’s indivisible.

So you nod, and he blurts out before he can stop himself:

“I want to feel it.”

 _That’s_ what he’s been wanting to say.

“You…”

“Set me on fire. Please. Just my hand, I just—“

And now you _are_ worried, because there’s something desperately self-destructive in the way he begs, so you try to make an excuse. There’s so much that could go wrong.

“I—“

“I know you can make it safe.” He says, and as if to prove it, passes his hand through the centre of the flame in front of him. Then, the hand is through the intangible barrier dividing you and he’s holding yours in his, eyes locked on you so intently that you can see your glowing hair reflected in his pupils. “I trust you.”

And you’re not even sure you trust yourself, but what better way to practise your finesse than this, so you tell him to hold his hand in the fire again, which he does, obedience laced with a vibrating anticipation.

Slowly, carefully, you peel the flames away from the spherical shape, moulding the shape of his outturned palm, licking them up fingers with a comforting warmth, until the hand burns untouched, every inch blanketed by this undefinable light. His breath is heavy, and he curls his fingers into his palm to watch the flames move with it, everything reflecting and shining, and he owes you, now, so you ask what you’ve been wanting to know.

“Is this about him? Archie?”

But he doesn’t answer, frustratedly and selfishly fixated on his flickering left hand. He raises it above his head, holding it outstretched in contrast to the void of starlit sky and you can see Hot Dog’s attention captured by it as the swollen skin of his black eye catches in the light. (So that’s why they call it a shiner.)

Salem drapes himself around your shoulders with a backhanded commendation as you concentrate, because to keep the shape of a sphere is easy, but wrapping the flames around his fingers takes much more deliberation, (and he really, _really_ owes you for this) and as he tilts his head up you count the moles on his neck again, like always. Seven.

Absently, you wonder if Archie’s ever counted them.

The flame goes out.

You hadn’t realised you were biting your lip in concentration, so you release it from your teeth as he drops his hand back to Hot Dog’s collar, like something taut between you has just snapped.

You pretend you don’t notice that there’s wetness on his cheeks.

“Thank you.” He says, and there’s some rare colour high in his face from the thrill, legs slightly weak as he stands.

You follow, and the two of you face each other in your crop circle isolation, you light, him dark, Hot Dog light, Salem dark, every kind of monochrome juxtaposition facing off in the stillness until he’s pulling you into him, arms so tight around you that you can hardly breathe, and you hold him right back, because this is what the both of you need right now.

You think that, from a distance, the low light would blend you together, one indistinguishable singular shadow under the treeline, the Greendale side of the river, mixed into one.

You think, to someone else, someone outside of this two metre wide bubble, you’d appear something too intertwined to be separated.

Maybe even indivisible.


End file.
